Here comes the spam

05/04/2011

Oh for heaven's sake. Can people just stop stealing email addresses, please?

Not that this is a silly attack like the password theft at Gawker Media last year. This is a proper, profit-motivated crime. Epsilon, a US-based marketing firm that runs email newsletters for hundreds of major businesses, has only gone and had its database hacked. Millions - literally millions - of live, functioning, in-use, actual human beings' email addresses - including, quite possibly, yours - have been 'compromised', which is posh talk for 'sold to spammers by the hackers for a lot of money.'

The emails have names attached, too, so any spam sent to them will be able to include a 'dear so-and-so' line, making the gullible more likely to be fooled by phishing emails and the like. Oh, it's all so depressing.

Let us reiterate: you should always use a separate email address for newsletters to the one you use for your main communications and important logons like banking. It's just safer that way, yeah?